Love

At the heart of this book is a love of literature. We don’t quite say that in thePreface or in ‘The Beginning’, but then, love often has to do with the unspoken. When King Lear is foolishly demanding each of his daughters in turn to tell him how much they love him, the most tender and devoted of them can only say to herself: ‘What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent’ (1.1.57). Rather differently, in a phrase dating back to a poem by Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, published in 1894, homosexuality has sometimes been called ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ (in Rodensky 2006, 192). These two examples, hundreds of years apart, already intimate something of the complex nature of our topic, not least in suggesting that love and language are indissociably linked. Love may be silent, but Shakespeare still needs words to make that point: without the device of the aside (in which the audience or reader can learn what Cordelia is thinking, without other characters knowing it), we wouldn’t know that she loved her father at all. And as we soon discover, not telling her father how much she loves him has dire consequences for Cordelia, her father and everyone else: the entire tragedy spills out of this refusal to speak of love. Correspondingly, the very wording of Douglas’s ‘love that dare not speak its name’ alerts us to the senses of fear, danger, constraint and concealment that (especially prior to its decriminalization in the UK in 1967) usually accompanied – and in many parts of the world still accompany – homosexual love. At the same time, these examples gesture towards another major dimension of our topic, namely the unsayable. Filial or romantic, straight or queer, love is often associated with what cannot be said, with the inexpressible or ineffable. And, paradoxically, talking about what cannot be said, about the ineffable, about what is ‘beyond words’, can prove to be an especially effective way of talking about love.